Terraphysics is a large scale real time terrain and water simulation. In most games the ground in games is completely unchangeable and unaffected by the players actions. Terraphyics will change that by making it easy for developers to set physical properties to the environment and integrating a simulation into their game.

It can simulate small effects like marks from tires in sand but also big changes that changes the environment completely such as avalanches or flood waves. The results of the simulation will be applied on a given heightmap commonly used in 3D games.

The simulation can be set up to use normal floating point operations in a single thread to be compatible to all platforms but also supports SSE, multithreading or DirectX11 to run on the GPU. As such it can utilize strong systems for the simulation of large areas bigger than 1000 square metres.

The videos shows a randomly generated terrain made of sand with smaller spikes in the outer regions and higher values in the middle of the map. Then the simulation is started which causes the sand pillars to collapse and form realistic shaped hills.